Hacker News Reader

Comment by landemva | Hacker News Reader

Like gold ETFs, they can do BTC synthetically via futures or have a custodian take custody.

The interesting ETF will be for Ethereum because a custodian can possibly stake it and earn yield. ETH can earn within the basic protocol.

View on HN

Right but gold isn't easy to steal. Bitcoin can disappear from a cosmic ray, hardware failure, remote theft, software glitch, etc.

Gold isn’t easy to steal because there are centuries worth of physical security demands that have evolved to protect it. Its relatively easy to take a chunk of metal from someone otherwise.

Nothing you listed applies to bitcoin besides remote theft. The whole point of a blockchain is be fault tolerant in the face of those real failures. Remote theft occurs from a failure to secure your private keys. That’s human error and will be resolved in the same way as gold with… custodians aka a bank.

Oh where there's a will (and a profit) there's a way. See this story about bags of nickels stored turned out to be filled with rocks.

https://www.businessinsider.com/jpmorgans-nickel-bags-turned...

Gold isn't easy to steal because it's heavy, and the more you steal, the more it weighs. There's a big difference between stealing an ounce of gold and stealing five tons of gold. But there's no difference in "weight" between stealing 0.1 BTC and 10,000 BTC.

Also, securing physical assets is much easier than securing digital assets.

You don't have to put all 10,000 BTC in a single wallet.

You can get your coins back if your cold wallet is destroyed?

If you have stored your seed securely (in a safe, preferably engraved on stainless steel), then no problem, you can re-generate your private key on a new wallet from it.

If you haven't written down your seed before generating your private key and also lost your private key, your money is lost. Thank you for this sacrifice for the common good, but you will want to educate yourself better next time.

Yes, if only one of a 2 of 3 account was lost. A person having a single seed phrase on a single cold wallet would lose coins and would probably benefit from using a service to educate them.

You can laser engrave a Bitcoin wallet seed (24 words) on titanium, store it in multiple locations and never enter your seed on a networked computer to prevent remote theft. You can also use a passphrase on top of your seed, and store it separately, so that even if the seed is physically stolen, the wallet won't be recoverable without the passphrase.

And when everyone becomes super paranoid and keeps their money from participating in the economy then we will transcend.

That's for the holding account, that is, the long term savings.

For the everyday purchases, a Lightning wallet on a smartphone is enough.

I know how people claim it works yes.

For further protection, store those titanium blocks in a “portable Hole” so they exist only in the Astral plane:

https://www.dndbeyond.com/magic-items/4699-portable-hole

Your coins aren't stored on a computer but on a distributed ledger around the globe, secured with strong crypto, Merkle trees and proofs of work. Your (hopefully cold) wallet only stores your private key.

Gold is hard to transport, easy to confiscate and hard to divide, thus difficult to use as a currency. None of those apply to Bitcoin. Well, unless someone is dumb enough to leave his money on an exchange.

Sounds like digital assets are not for you. Gold and silver coin in your pocket are a time-tested approach.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com